His Royal Highness: Berlin production featuring the artist who turned the queen into a Nazi returns

The late Christoph Schlingensief was one of Germany's great provocateurs. Can the terrifying B-movie aesthetics of his work still shock us into rethinking media power, colonialism and the far right? Christoph Schlingensief certainly knew how to provoke. After the first Berlin performance of Chapiro City at the Volksbühne theater in 2006, the Sunday Express headlined: "Outrage over German play that shows the queen as a Nazi."

Christoph Schlingensif certainly knew how to provoke. "Outrage at German play that makes Queen a Nazi," headlined the Sunday Express after Capro City premiered at Berlin's Volksbohn Theater in 2006. Based on the events of American performance artist Alan Kaprow, the play focuses on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In one scene, the Queen of Time performs a Hitler salute. Another re-enacts the paparazzi chase that led to Diana's fatal crash. Diana appears in bed next to two men with Down syndrome. And Camilla is splashed with animal blood. Schlingenzieff insisted that it was not intended as a provocation, but as an inquiry into how Diana became a modern icon. But his art grew with rage, revealing the absurdity of societies that glorified their idols while consuming their lives as entertainment.

The city of Capro is at the heart of a new Berlin show - It's Not My Problem Anymore, Pay With Your Shit - that revisits the artist's legacy. In Gropius Bau's grand Neo-Renaissance atrium, visitors encounter the remnants of a spinning carousel-like stage that he called an "animatography." Looking at this installation today is like a glimpse into Schlingenzieff's mind: a chaotic collage of childhood memories, violent fantasies and regal glamour.

Gropius Bauer installed roughly half of Schlingenzieff's original collection in the same spot where Joseph Beuys, a major influence, once displayed his moose monuments. In the town of Capro, a flickering black-and-white film of a crucifixion under a stone slab shows the contents of the scene, from "Diana the Ballerina" to "The Exorcism." In the original production, the audience was distributed in 18 small wedge-shaped rooms, reflecting Alan Kaprow's 18 events in 6 episodes. The audience saw only fragments of this act. Now most of the interior of the stage is covered with plastic. A selection of videos from the playback loop during installation on old TV screens.

Big tabloid headlines and articles are pasted on the walls behind it. "Will Diana's sons stop Schlingenzieff?" asks a German newspaper alongside a Sunday Express headline. After rumors that the royal family might pursue legal action, Schlingensif invited William and Harry to the Frieze, where he planned to present an iteration of the project.

"The combination of Lady Day, the speculation surrounding the circumstances of her death, and the general legend that grew up around her fascinated Christoph," says set designer Aino Labrens, Schlingenseff's widow, who now manages his estate. For the Volksbühne production, Schlingensief chose Jenny Elvers, a German television personality whose private life, like Diana's, was a fixture of the newspapers, between glamor and intense scrutiny. Laberenz cautions against viewing the town of Kaprow only through Diana's lens. It belonged, he says, to a wider art world in which theatre, film and art overlapped with questions of media power and spectacle.

Schlingenzieff, who died of lung cancer in 2010 on the eve of his 50th birthday, grew up in the shadow of the new German cinema and was deeply influenced by filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Like Fassbinder, he blurred the boundaries between art and politics. In The Twin Towers of Africa, he took actors including Patti Smith, Irm Hermann and Robert Stadtluber to Namibia to recreate Wagnerian myths and confront the legacy of German colonial genocide. Namibian actors also participated.

Seen today, Schlingenzieff's artistic vocabulary - B-movie horror, drag, disabled performers, extreme taste - sits strangely with Namibia as a setting. Watching his actors improvise on Shark Island, the site of the former German concentration camp where prisoners from Herro and Nama endured forced labor and starvation, feels unsettling. Not because it's hollow provocation (it's not), but because one wonders if the team fully understands what they're doing. Namibia looks less like a subject of reckoning with Germany's colonial past than a backdrop for a German artist's grand vision. In Gropius Bau, the African Twin Towers appear as a series of sequences on 18 screens.

However, Schlingenzieff's work on the far right remains remarkably relevant – not only because of the rise of the AfD in Germany, but also because of his confrontational approach to anti-immigrant politics. In his version of Hamlet, he brought former far-right extremists to the stage at the Schuesspilhaus in Zurich and later the Volksbühne in Berlin, where they recreated the central scene of Shakespeare's murder amid far-right rock music and a Nazi aesthetic. A Schlingenzieff quote taped to the exhibition wall reads: "We are not playing Hamlet, we are playing Germany." It depicts the artist's insistence that art should confront society rather than provide an escape.

The same attitude applies to Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container, his 2000 project in which asylum seekers lived under surveillance in a Big Brother-style container next to the Vienna State Opera, while the audience voted two a day on who should be deported first. Conceived in response to the entry of the far-right FPÖ into the Austrian government, the project turned deportation – or, as the AfD calls it, “immigration” – into an eerie spectacle. It exposed European racism while implicating viewers in its public reproduction.

Looking at these works today, one cannot help but wonder how far-right actors have learned to adopt such an aesthetic display as a political tool. The AfD's AI Remigration Hit video from 2024, for example, revels in humiliating migrant men being taken to planes by Aryan pilots. Schlingenzieff's work serves as a warning of how easily such cruelty can become entertainment. And how easily the media helps normalize it, from the tabloid frenzy surrounding Diana to the far-right supremacist language of "immigration."

"I can see in the comments how much he's been missed," Labrens says at the end of our interview. "Imamen, I also want to say that it is up to us, whether we work in the field of art or not, not to leave the responsibility to someone else so that we don't have to do the work anymore."

Christoph Schlingensief: It's Not My Problem Anymore Deal with Your Own Shit is at Gropius Bau, Berlin, until January 17th.